


Red, Green, Blue

by fullofimber



Category: Doki Doki Literature Club! (Visual Novel)
Genre: Doki Doki Literature Club! Spoilers, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-31 06:03:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17843825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fullofimber/pseuds/fullofimber
Summary: Left alone to wreak havoc on the game's code, Monika does whatever she can to entertain herself. She falters, however, when, at Yuri's, she touches a particularly vital nerve.





	Red, Green, Blue

It sort of went to her head, the nature of the whole situation. Everything was so easy to sew up; the engine was so rudimentary as to appear almost forgiving. She herself was bolstered by the fact that, despite all her fiddling, she was yet to have truly ruined anything. Nothing had corrupted the game or crashed it outright. The script had been resilient, the console immutable at her fingertips. 

It had surprised her quite how naturally she had, in her own faintly embarrassing terms, 'ascended'. Her head was so full, her thoughts flitting around so quickly, that she had forgotten how it had all felt when it first began. Perhaps it had been vaguely spiritual, in a terrifying way - like opening one hundred of your eyes at once, when you've only ever seen through two - but her thought patterns, her memories, and her values had come to melt, one by one, in all the light she'd let in. As she pushed forward in this, she felt - or at least said to herself - that there was no choice but to forsake introspection. 

It was awful. Not even she would dispute it. Without thinking, she had beaten her newfound liberty into her grasp; she had made herself its master. This triumph was coppery and wet in her mouth. She was light, and, for the first time, joyful, as she imagined a teenager should be. A two-part credo had come true to Monika, and she had barely tried to guard herself against it: do what feels good, and, if anything breaks, fix it later. 

 

The girls were seeming more and more like paper every day, but that didn't diminish their importance. However dull club could be with four cardboard girls, Monika found that things were almost four times as unbearable when she was by herself. 

Besides, to say that the girls were cardboard was kind of unkind, and, moreover, it was not as accurate as Monika would have liked. She had a sense now of why each girl was so appealing – each image had been drawn with thick lines, for sure, a lot of shorthand pulled whole-cloth from some of the more salubrious anime tropes, but it was this same unreality that gave each silhouette its own defiant and sharp shape. The deredere, the tsundere, the dandere – they were accessible at a glance, colourful and pretty cut-outs that gave a convincing impression of layers underneath. 

There was a charm to that in itself, Monika mused. There must have been a reason it worked so well. 

And, again, she rapped at the door, trilling out into the night air and cicada song. 

“He-ey! Yu-ri!” 

It took a minute or so for her to hear someone's step bump down onto the final stair. She held a book close to her chest as she heard the lock being opened. 

Yuri's left eye peered through the gap in the door. 

“Oh. Uh. Monika?” 

“Yeah, silly. Who does it look like?” The two of them exchanged a laugh from each side of the door, though Yuri's was a little faint. “I just finished _Markov_ , so I thought I'd bring it over.” 

“Oh.” 

Monika grinned, perhaps more to herself than to anyone else in this moment.  

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” 

“Oh – ah – oh – yeah, I – let me–“ 

Yuri’s voice was lost as she closed the door again, and Monika heard the sound of the door chain sliding to. 

“Tea?” 

Almost as soon as she'd opened the door Yuri was walking away from her, into the kitchen. Monika didn't know whether to interpret it as a sign of fear or of familiarity; no matter how many times it happened, she doubted she would ever know. 

Nevertheless, she strolled into the kitchen, placing _The Portrait of Markov_ on the edge of the counter. 

“Coffee, please, Yuri.” Monika smirked a little to herself, leaning as casually as she could up against the fridge. “You know how it is. Black, two sugars.” 

Yuri fell silent for a minute or so, waiting for the kettle to boil. As the noise gathered she began to speak. “That’s twice now since this semester started.” Yuri glanced over to the book before she smiled in her usual way, eyes averted, cheeks scarlet; she had a habit of looking rather pained when doing so. “I could buy you a copy, you know? If you really love it so much…” 

“That’s sweet, Yuri.” Monika coughed to herself, trying to disguise her own growing flush behind her hand. She formed the tightest fist she could muster, balling her eyes up. 

No. In this, you had to be firm. 

“It’s sweet that you would offer. And it's sweet that you're so naive.” 

Yuri’s hands had stilled over the cups, her eyes wide, Monika guessed, with more fear than recognition.  

“Well, it sounds ridiculous, Monika,” Yuri began, an uneasy smile in her voice, “but I'm not sure I quite understand what you mean.” 

Monika was still hesitant about bridging the gap. It hadn't been built into her – into any of them – to do so much as reach out to one another, let alone make the first move in this context. She was no expert, but she felt from experience that success with Yuri tended to hinge on a gentle, though perceptible, sense of escalation. 

So, much to her own disappointment, she leant back against the kitchen table, and tried to speak plainly. 

“What I mean is. It’s not that I like the book.” She clenched her fists, launching another try. “It’s more that I like _you_. And that's why I keep coming back.” 

Yuri was giving little away. She was moving again, in nervous, jerky movements, struggling with the lid of the coffee jar. 

“I’m sorry I made excuses like this. And I wasn’t trying to lie to you, anyway. I really like _Markov_ – Here, Yuri.” Monika stepped forward and grabbed the jar. As she wrenched at the top, it popped open, the plastic glancing off the countertop and under the kitchen table with a sudden clatter. 

_All this for a cup of shitty instant coffee_ , thought Monika, as she knelt and reached to retrieve the top. 

“Hey, Monika?” 

She glanced upwards and was met with somewhat of a worm's eye view of the girl. Immediately her cheeks reddened, and she looked away in panic. 

Yuri dropped down to one knee in front of Monika, herself blushing profusely; coolly as ever, however, she too reached out for the lid. 

“Looks like it’s gone, huh?” 

Monika’s laugh was timorous as she settled back onto her haunches. 

“Nah. It’s there.” Yuri brought her head up again and tugged several long strands of hair behind her ear. “Just not sure I feel like crawling under a table tonight.” 

“Ah. Of course.” Monika shifted her legs out from under herself. In all honesty, she felt slightly wounded. Would Yuri really shrug this off as if nothing had been said at all? Not even so much as a ‘no’? Her sense of decorum had to be superhuman, her fear of social interaction a thousand times more paralysing than Monika had ever anticipated. 

Whatever. She screwed her face up, pushing her cheek against her shoulder, begging herself not to start crying. These things happened, Monika reasoned, although this was, admittedly, the first time that it had happened to her. Monika was steeling her jaw, preparing to get to her feet and leave, when she felt someone exhale against her cheek. 

“Huh?” 

“Oh – ah –” 

Yuri turned her head away, colouring red again; she was crouched like something preparing to pounce, her face mere inches from Monika’s. 

“I – uh. I thought you were laughing.” 

Monika squinted at her in disbelief. “What do you mean?” 

“I was… I was looking to see if you were laughing at me.” Yuri looked down at herself and exhaled again, before another torrent burst out. “I thought for sure you were doing something. Like, pranking me. I thought somebody else was hiding out nearby and you’d embarrass me in front of them. Or I thought you would do something awful and tell everyone about it. I thought you would take pictures and spread them around the whole school.” 

Monika’s voice grew fainter as the realisation began to dawn, but all she could do was repeat, brokenly, “What?” 

“I mean, that’s what happens, right? When you’re different… you kind of live with a target painted on your back, right?” Yuri broke eye contact as she said this. “Look at it my way, Monika. I really, really can’t afford to believe that anything you say to me is in any way genuine. That you’re not just playing a joke on me.” 

“What do you-?” 

“We’re not alike, Monika. We’re not.” Yuri seemed to be spitting out her words at this point, folding her bitterness tightly into herself as she persisted. “You’re perfect, okay? You’re perfect. Perfect in a way I could only envision in a dream – perfect in a way I could never envision being.” 

As Monika watched Yuri speak, she saw Yuri’s eyes – resolute in their effort to not meet hers – filling with tears. Monika had tooled around with things a lot, sure, but she was yet to have unearthed this level of emotional response – she was faintly astonished Yuri had it in her. Still, she knew she had to try her best to return herself to the situation. “Yuri, please. I swear you’ve got the wrong idea about me.” 

Yuri took a breath and wiped both of her eyes with the heel of her hand. When she spoke again, her voice was even. “Your test scores are always sky-high. You’re great at sports and singing. Every guy in school fawns over you. You have everything that anybody could ever want.” 

Monika flinched a little at this. There did come times where she regretted having embellished her own character file so much – and this time smarted particularly badly, because it was the first time that she had seen it reflected back to herself in such sharp relief. 

“I was sure you had no other reason to be here.” 

“For Christ’s sake, Yuri.” Monika reached upward, taking Yuri’s cheek in her hand and guiding it toward her. Yuri’s eyes were wide as their lips met; it took a second or so for her to comprehend what was happening, but then her eyes began to close, her attention fully shifted to the carnal. 

_Textbook._  

The shy girl’s affections seemed considerably stoked by the security of Monika’s grasp; she whined a little, but slipped away, her mouth pliant and open, when Monika finally pushed them apart. 

She didn’t know what was making her want an answer, tonight of all nights. It would mean absolutely nothing in the long run. But consciousness was itching at her, aching in the most awful and intolerable of ways. The question came almost involuntarily when she spoke again. 

“Is it really so hard for you to believe that someone could want you?” 

Yuri blinked a couple of times, seemingly unaware that Monika wanted an answer. The realisation was late to her; when it did come, she was quick to hide her laughter behind her sleeve. She was quiet again for another second or so, before she smirked and spoke.  

“Yes.” She settled her arms around Monika's neck, fixing her with a demure smile. “And even harder to believe that it would be you.” 

Monika wasn’t sure whether to feel offended or not. She furrowed her brow. 

“What do you mean by that?” 

Yuri giggled again, though Monika felt an edge to it. “Don’t act like you don’t know. You’re not really fooling me at the moment.” Yuri sighed, breaking eye-contact. “It’s not… We all know love’s going to happen to us sooner or later, right? Like, it’s a basic certainty – we’ve just got to wait for the right one to come along and pick us out. At least, that was what I was taught to believe.” 

“Yeah.” 

“And I was always told… they told me that the one who would come for me would be…” She coughed quietly, evidently embarrassed. “I was only ever expecting it to be a man.” 

Monika blinked. She had been doing this for so long that she had forgotten quite how deep the programming went. 

“Right. Uhm.” Monika took a gentle hold of Yuri’s right arm, readying herself to disentangle the two of them. “If you didn’t want to do this, Yuri, you could have just said, you know?” 

Yuri grinned a wide grin, pulling her arms together. 

“You shouldn’t be too hasty, President. Especially since you went through all this trouble, confessing and everything.” 

The girl’s lips were close, her breath warm on Monika’s skin. 

“You shouldn’t think I hadn’t thought about it. I– Well. I’d never committed much thought to a scenario like this.” She ducked her head a little, speaking into Monika’s collar as she continued. “It just seemed totally unrealistic. Because you're beautiful. Because you're the apex of desirability. I'd always thought so.” 

Monika broke into a genuine grin despite herself. It was a little miserable, but she couldn’t deny the fulfillment it gave her. 

“The apex of desirability…” She smiled at Yuri, tracing her index finger behind the other girl’s ear and lazily down her neck. When she moved her hand up to cup Yuri’s chin, she could feel a pulse, throbbing clearly and regularly at the top of her neck. 

The contact spurred a particular sense of sickness in her. Despite her own enjoinders to herself, she couldn’t help wondering what two lines of code were meeting to make this happen. It drummed against her fingers in a disturbingly concrete rhythm, as if it had been set to an external clock. The pulse was always unnerving. She had used to wonder why she could still feel hers, given that she was entirely certain that she didn’t – couldn’t – have one. That was one of many thoughts that she had had to shelve over time, but, now that she had glanced over Yuri’s pulse, she couldn’t seem to leave it alone. It stung her, quite how convincingly humanity – or the impression of it, at the least – shimmered across both her and her club mates’ skin. There was so much attention to detail, design that extended to the edge of her being – and she couldn’t help asking, why? What was this for? _Who_ was this for?   

“Hey?” 

Monika seemed to regain herself, fall back into her body, a dull weight. She was only touching the girl’s neck, but, still, Yuri’s breath was heavy, its passage palpable on Monika’s hand. 

“Monika?” 

She met Yuri’s eyes, wide and purple, their attention undivided, their lids heavy. 

“Kiss me. Please.” 

“Huh?” 

“The way you’re holding me. It’s making my heart pound.” She paused for a second, averting her gaze. “Everything feels like it’s burning. Every nerve ending, like it’s frayed and crackling.” 

Monika’s eyes widened. She was acquainted with this. Yuri’s pain had a sudden new sense of acuity. Something reached out to her now, a dark shadow of empathy. It rushed again through her stomach, the same dark ooze of panic that she had been swimming in for a long time, just before she’d woken up. She could taste it – a whole bunch of static, a whole bunch of directionless pain, blind and screaming. 

“Yuri…” 

Yuri giggled a little, seeming ever more frantic; Monika noticed the other girl’s right hand beginning to fidget nervously behind Monika’s back, twisting and knotting the strap of her dress. 

“It’s okay. I think this…is how it is.” She exhaled and smiled up at Monika. “You know? To be in love. So, please. Kiss me. I think if you kiss me, I’ll feel better.” 

Was it worth trying? She didn’t know. She couldn’t tell if it would even be moral to try. Not that she got too much time to think about it. Shaking harder now, Yuri pulled Monika towards her, pushing their lips together. 

Well. It didn’t seem to be hurting her. On the contrary, it seemed to ground her; she was seeking sensation from every source possible, finding it, for now, at least, in two handfuls of Monika’s hair.  

She was pulling a little; her nails were sharp. 

Even so. 

There was still time, Monika reasoned.  

 

Kissing. Touching. Feeling. You could really spiral out of control if you committed too much thought to it, and Monika did not have that luxury today. She had gotten what she wanted. If anything, the whole thing was ending much more amicably and normally than ever before. Yuri was determined, at any rate, to give Monika a cup of coffee before she left, and Monika far too distracted to quite understand what she was agreeing to. 

As her skirt hitched on the kitchen stool, her train of thought broke, and she found herself speaking aloud. 

“I don’t think that love is like this.” 

“Mm?” 

As Yuri set the tray down and took a place across from her, Monika struggled to pick up the thread again. “Wh-what you said earlier. About feeling like this, and about being in love.” The girl displayed both her hands, shaking, by way of explanation. “I don’t think- I’m not sure that this is how it’s supposed to go.” 

Yuri reached over the table, smiling gently.  

“Then I would wonder if you’re a touch deluded about love, love.” Upon saying this, Yuri giggled into her tea. This, too, was an evident novelty for her. “No offense, of course. But it’s not all sweetness and light, you know. At least, it doesn’t seem reasonable to expect it to be so. Even when I was only dreaming of it, I’d envisioned the whole thing to be quite bitter – quite bloody.” 

Monika gave a calm smile. “That’s fairly true to your personality, Yuri.” 

In the silence that followed, Monika heard the insects singing again. She tapped her fingers restlessly against the table for a second, before she saw Yuri watching her and balled her hands into fists. What she would give to be out there again, blotted against the street-lights, singing her throat into nothingness. She smiled as best she could and drained her cup in a few mouthfuls. 

“Thirsty.” Yuri smiled. “Would you like some more?” 

“Can’t.” The whole reply was brusque, though Monika wasn't sure she could help it. As she tried to get up from the stool, she bumped to the floor, ungainly and shaken. “Sorry, Yuri. I've got to go now.” 

“Really?” 

“Yeah, _really_.” Monika managed a wry grin, though on the inside it was already turning up at the corners, beginning to taste quite sour in her mouth. “I have lots of things waiting for me at home.” 

“Well. It's a shame.” Yuri tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, smiling as she did so. The daring that she had worked up had dissipated quickly.

Monika laughed a little. “You should go to bed, Yuri. You seem kind of tired.” 

Yuri cast her eye over Monika and past her. Something way in the distance appeared to have caught her attention. “Maybe so.” She paused, taking a breath. “Still. If you won't stay with me, there’s something you have to promise me.” 

“Oh?” 

“Really.” As Monika passed to her side of the table, Yuri grasped her arm, staring up at her. “Will you?” 

Monika tried her best to look casual. “What is it, Yuri?” 

“Come back for me. Please.” 

Here, at least, she was able to nod without any severe sense of dread. 

“I’ll come back. I promise it.” 

 

Monika felt an interminable stinging as the night air touched her. White lines stood sharp on her neck, lurid and blatant now she’d tied her hair up. She would have been ashamed, had she thought that anyone would see. Secure, however, in the knowledge that no one was watching, her composure gave way to something entirely different, something quite difficult for her to name. 

This too was sensation. This too was what she wanted, right? This too was what she had sought, standing out in the doorway and calling into the night. 

She wanted to vomit. Her stomach felt like it was full of noise, full of static, full of light. She stilled, briefly, in the empty road, doubling over, though she knew it wouldn’t help. 

The cicadas had grown louder. Perhaps they knew what was coming. With new resolution, Monika opened the console as she sank to her knees. 

The flick of a pen. A gesture or two. Simple as writing a poem – simple as fixing that one line that wouldn’t rhyme. Simple as correcting one misspelt word. 

 

_Copying 1 item from_ _b_ _ack-up to_ _c_ _haracters_  

_The destination already has a file named “_ _y_ _uri.chr_ _”_  

**_Replace the file in the destination_ ** 

_Skip this file_  

_Compare info for both files._  

 

And, now, by far the worst part. A large fissure ran through her field of vision – and, then, nothing. 

 

_TEAM SALVATO_  

_This game is not suitable for_ _children_ _or those who are easily disturbed_ _._  


End file.
